The passing of Nelson Mandela brings historical significance in remembering the symbolic past as well as the future. In historical memory and the struggles against racism which brings South Africa towards a new beginning in both grief and gratitude. What is next for South Africa in the current economic times? How will the people cope? There is still a major hurdle that haunts the legacy with the escalating issues of crime, corruption, and economic inequality within the nation in heaps of echoing disintegration. A resource-rich nation may just see the rising sun and continue life into the distant future.
7 December 2013
29 October 2013
New Shows On Network TV
It seems like Hollywood is going stale with lackluster movie productions while the network TV is going strong with an array of variety drama depicting the many social interactions. A few shows to note:
Person of Interest
Trophy Wife
Mom
Back in the Game
The Blacklist
Mr Selfridge
The Michael J Fox Show
Web TV and sites like Netflix are ultimately the next trend for the future as more and more entertainment is becoming socially connected and internet is becoming the more intricate part of daily life for many.
23 October 2013
Learning for Free
There are immense ways to learn online. However, at times, the options can be quite overwhelming if not dubious. Some options have arisen through university and publishing initiatives that are quite worthy of note. It seems online learning is an emerging growth market and with semantic web it can provide even more options. Virtual learning is on the rise to meet busy lives and to reach out globally. Some interesting learning sites are able to provide even full degrees through the online process. The following links are a few options that appear to be available from noteworthy institutions. Also, one of the more rather flexible and obvious choice is via youtube.
10 October 2013
Machine Learning
Machine Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence which studies systems which are able to learn from a given set of data as examples. It can be split into two main strands supervised learning (classification) and unsupervised learning (clustering) and in some cases semi-supervised. Some algorithms don't fit into either category explicitly. For most applications learning algorithms need to be carefully tested against customized data for each specific context. Also, the choice of a learning algorithm is important as they all have merits and drawbacks. However, hybrid approaches are seen to generally work the best as they are able to reflect off each other in the reduction of error margins and increased accuracy of learning. Or, perhaps, one can head in the direction of deep learning. The following is a list of some useful books, tools, and free courses in the area.
Books:
Online Courses:
....and more, check out mloss.org
Alternative Tools (Not Free)
Precog
....and others.
Repositories of Datasets:
kdnuggets
Journal/Conference Communities:
AAAI Topics
ACM SIGKDD/IR
AITopicsResearch
OpenAccess
Repositories of Datasets:
kdnuggets
Journal/Conference Communities:
AAAI Topics
ACM SIGKDD/IR
AITopicsResearch
OpenAccess
8 October 2013
E-Commerce and Subscriptions
E-Commerce is big business on the web with more and more software as a service options cropping up daily in a multitude of offerings and points of integration. It seems flexibility to integrate is core to business functionality and speed to delivery. Restful services are making strides towards building a more resourceful and accessible web. However, the web is still a very disenchanted place with a lot to be done in terms of linking and connecting concepts and things in a meaningful way. GoodRelations is a vocabulary that takes ontologies for E-Commerce a step further towards knowledge discovery and metarepresentation.
Online subscription services are starting to make inroads towards a more barrier free integration for E-Commerce businesses with more flexible options for billing and transaction processing. One key aspect to note towards deciding on a integration provider is to always try to check their security policies and how PCI compliant are their services. A few key players that have sprung up with interesting options are below:
Stripe - very simple pricing model with no added fees making it cost-effective and easy to use
Zuora - providing added support for taxation, metrics, currencies and salesforce integration
Chargify - added benefits for coupons, free-trial periods, recurring/one-time transactions and refunds
Spreedly - payments platform with comprehensive services also provided with heroku add-on
Recurly - providing a full subscription commerce with analytics and a fast integration process
Braintree - easy to manage API with reasonable pricing with international payments support
Zuora - providing added support for taxation, metrics, currencies and salesforce integration
Chargify - added benefits for coupons, free-trial periods, recurring/one-time transactions and refunds
Spreedly - payments platform with comprehensive services also provided with heroku add-on
Recurly - providing a full subscription commerce with analytics and a fast integration process
Braintree - easy to manage API with reasonable pricing with international payments support
5 September 2013
The Web of Sentiments
Increasingly, the web is opening up new avenues for customers and consumers to voice their service and product issues and share it on the Internet. In process, with the viral growth of sentiments, it is bound to make a company or an individual notice and respond. There are a multitude of avenues opening up for customers: blogging, review sites, Google ads, Facebook, Twitter, and even Twitter Promoted Tweets. The sensational way of viral marketing can be utilized for voicing opinions all from the Internet. This will no doubt make many companies rethink their approach to public relations, after sales services, customer satisfaction, and in quality assuring their products.
Subjectivity
Subjectivity
Apple Products Are Not Upgradeable
What you are paying a premium on with Apple is the aesthetic design. The build quality is cheap. The functionality not fully tested. Support services are over priced. The OS configuration security services are a right pain for application installation. And, one of the biggest flaws of Apple products are that they are non-upgradeable and nor future proof once bought. One has to pay premium and almost double to get an upgrade of any sort and the products do not even fully support upgrade options as they are so limited in hardware capacity to allow for that. In the general PC market, an upgrade is understandably a major requirement for customers to be supported by any vendor. However, on most Apple macs just to do a memory upgrade one has to buy an entire amount rather than the amount you want to actually upgrade to with the existing memory. On most machines these combinations are fully supported. It is always advisable on an Apple to buy memory option all inclusive within one card slot rather than split into two in case one decides to upgrade. That is the only way it is possible to avoid paying double on upgrades with Apple. The model of most Apple products seem to work on the notion of point of sale only, customers often need to be aware that that is all they will get for their money and nothing more later on in terms of support or upgrades.
31 August 2013
Atariya
Sushi, in particular, Japanese places in London are quite a few. However, finding quality places is fairly limited. YoSushi! is one of the cheapest places around lacking in much freshness of the fish and cannot in all honesty be classed as a Japanese takeaway. One of the best places I find in London is Atariya where the fish is just deliciously fresh and tender on rice. The sushi quality is splendid. They can be found mostly in north side of London and provide for both takeaway and eating in options. They have one main branch situated in central London. Atariya also provides a wide selection of fish and other options.
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